“A snake!” he exclaimed. “I’ve fallen into a den of serpents!”
He drew his hand quickly away, fear and disgust overpowering him for a moment. Then the thing seemed to be at his left hand. This time, in spite of himself, his fingers closed around it.
“A rope! It’s a rope!” he cried aloud, as he vainly tried to catch hold of it and stay his sliding downward. But the rope slipped from his fingers, and his journey down the curious shaft was unstayed.
“This must have been dug by men,” thought Fenn. “I’ll wager the smugglers had something to do with it. Why, maybe it’s one of the ways they land their men. That’s it! I must be sliding right down into the lake. They use the rope with which to pull themselves up the slippery tunnel.”
This idea seemed feasible to him, and he made further efforts to grasp the rope, in order that he might stop and pull himself up, instead of being carried on into Lake Superior.
For that this was to be his fate he now feared, since, as near as he could tell, the tunnel sloped in that direction. But though he occasionally felt the rope, first on one side of him, and then on the other, he could not get a sufficient grasp on the slippery strands, covered as they were with clay, to check his progress.
“I guess I’m doomed to go to the bottom,” he thought. “If I only fall into deep water it won’t be so bad. I can swim out. But if I land on the rocks—”
Fenn did not like to think about it. In fact his heart was full of terror at his strange situation, and only his natural courage kept him from giving way to despair. But he was filled with a dogged determination to save himself if he could, even at the end.
Though it has taken quite a while to describe Fenn’s queer mishap, it did not take him long to accomplish it. He was slipping along at considerable speed, being shunted from side to side as the tunnel widened or narrowed, but, on the whole, being carried onward and downward in a fairly straight line.
Suddenly the blackness was illuminated the least bit by a tiny point of light below and in front of him. It looked like an opening.